Introduction

We shall begin with a brief trip away from Provence to the Auvergne for a story originally told by Gregory of Tours: a tale of how the bishop of Javols managed to transform a cult paid to a sacred lake into a chapel in honour of St Hilary of Poitiers. According to Gregory, each year ‘a crowd of rustics’ feasted at the lake for several days, making a series of offerings to this same lake, including textiles, wool and models of food, as well as animal sacrifices. In consequence, says Gregory, each year thunder storms ensued, demonstrating the divine displeasure these activities caused. Eventually, a new (unnamed) bishop arrived and came to preach an end to this practice. When the crowds ignored his exhortations, he built a church near the lake in which he placed the relics of Hilary of Poitiers, and urged the people to transfer their devotions:

According to Gregory, the crowd were instantly converted, left the lake behind and brought their offerings to the new church. Thanks to the translatio of the relics to the site, moreover, the storm never came again at this time of year.

This story raises several points that are useful for approaching the themes of this chapter. Firstly, there is the bishop’s blunt statement to the crowd: Nulla religio est in stagno.Footnote ² Talal Asad used this example in an influential essay to demonstrate the very constructedness and lack of universality of the category ‘religion’; as Asad cogently argues, such a case neatly demonstrates how it is power that constructs religion.Footnote ³ In the bishop’s soundbite we can see, in a neat (if borrowed?) formulation, the claim of religious (episcopal) authority to define what was and what was not religion.Footnote ⁴ This account is but one particularly clear example of what was a widespread phenomenon in late antiquity, whereby preachers and their audiences came into conflict over definitions and boundaries. The sermons of Caesarius constitute a body of texts brim-full of material that deals with the issue of proper religion. How religion should (and should not) be lived is a key theme of the Admonitiones. The power to decide this belonged to the bishop, to the church, the authorized proponents of the word of God. This power dynamic lies at the heart of this part of the book and indeed in much of the religious historiography of this period. All too often, however, previous scholars have taken on the views of ecclesiasts regarding what does and does not count in the study of religion, in the history of religious change and especially in that of christianization. In order to understand this history properly, we need to deconstruct the power relations that authorized certain religious practices or beliefs, while excluding others: thus we return again to the notion of popular culture as unauthorized culture.Footnote ⁵ In the previous chapter I explored how clerical discourse constructed a negative picture of popular culture on the one hand, while on the other it made tangible efforts (albeit with limited success) both to curtail and to substitute elements of this culture. This chapter moves away from a purely top-down approach, focused on the ecclesiastical elite, to consider a more diverse range of evidence, including material culture, as well as approaches drawn from anthropological, archaeological and religious studies, in order to build up a picture of popular culture on rather different terms.

I shall be focusing here largely on the capacious and contested category of ‘religion’, for several reasons. The nature of the available evidence is of course important, but there are also significant methodological advantages. Firstly, as I have shown, clerical discourse set out to define a particular zone as the ‘religious’ and to denigrate elements that lay outside its boundaries. An important aim of this chapter is to seek to understand many of these aspects in their own terms, and thus to provide an alternative to ecclesiastical definitions of ‘religion’. Secondly, this focus provides an opportunity to make use of an especially fruitful approach: I shall be focusing on what Robert Orsi and others have suggestively called ‘lived religion’:

Looking at ‘lived religion’ entails a switch of focus away from the problems that have bedevilled traditional models of ‘popular religion’, as well as enabling a far more realistic and integrated understanding of the cultural ‘work’ done by religion in late antiquity.Footnote ⁷ Building on the examination of the countryside in Chapter 3, my analysis seeks to embed this lived religion in its rural context. In this way, lived religion provides a valuable frame for the understanding of popular culture tout court.

In my study of ‘lived religion’ in late antique southern Gaul I shall focus on the countryside in particular, as it is here that we see most clearly the traces of lived religion in the daily life, rituals and practices of the non-elite world. The aim is to look at both individuals and communities as actors and agents in their own right, acting to construct their own ‘lived religion’. We can see how they did this through intersecting with the power structures (both secular and sacred) around them, as well as with the natural world, making use of objects as well as texts and oral culture. As with my approach to popular culture more broadly, I shall argue that we need to understand the domain of religion as dynamic, as operating in tension with these structures, in accordance with pressures and influences from above as well as below.

To return to the stagnant lake in the Auvergne: my aim in this chapter is not least to seek to understand how a pond did contain religion: to examine the ways in which ‘religion’ is constructed in diverse ways by different agents. My interest is not so much with whether and how the church (either locally or more broadly) sought to make accommodation with such sites,Footnote ⁸ but rather to seek to understand how local people themselves, as active agents, constructed their own religious environments, and what adaptations they made in a context of both religious and social change. The natural environment will be one of the prominent themes of this chapter, as I examine how individuals and communities alike created and modified their religious practice in the context of the natural, calendrical and agricultural elements of their lives.Footnote ⁹

The rituals and practices under examination were not the unique preserve of any one class or type of person. However, and crucially, religion in the late antique countryside was constructed in a profoundly unequal social and economic landscape. Even if, as we shall see, landlords and peasants could choose similar solutions to such perennial environmental challenges as the threat of hail, both the seriousness of the threat and the scale of resources available at their disposal to meet this threat were highly disparate. Moreover, as we shall see, ecclesiastical and legal structures responded differently to given religious behaviours, depending on the social status of the practitioners involved. Religious choices and practices cannot be understood in a social vacuum. Indeed, for the framework of lived religion to be truly viable, it must itself be embedded in its social and economic framework. My model of lived religion therefore envisages a social and cultural domain embedded in the habitus and the social and economic structures of late antique southern Gaul. ‘Religion’, as an embedded domain, provided a site for contestation as well as oppression; for communal as well as individual expression and action. ‘Lived religion’ comprises a substantial part of the culture and experience of our late antique subjects.

In this chapter, then, I am using a model of ‘lived religion’ which is analogous to that of popular culture. Both are constructed through a series of processes: creation, appropriation, ‘poaching’. Both have influences from both ‘above’ and ‘below’. Both contain elements we might call oppositional – but neither need or indeed should be considered as inherently oppositional. Both can be shared by various sub-groups and can have diverse possible relationships to elite and official culture/s. Both popular culture and lived religion operate across unequal landscapes, and the actors involved have markedly different levels of access to resources, and indeed to power. Questions of power and inequality therefore remain important components of the analysis.

The rest of this chapter will focus on the lived religion primarily of the rural inhabitants of southern Gaul (whose environments and livelihoods I described in Chapter 3), at times supplemented by material from elsewhere in the late antique world. As far as possible I shall seek to analyse this religion from divergent viewpoints, particularly those of the lay non-elite, even when we are, as so often, forced to rely on clerical texts. However, in this chapter I am also able to make use of the evidence of material culture, as well as, at times, of comparative material. Even if I begin with an episode from clerical literature, I shall then expand outwards, using complementary sources, to gain a deeper, wider, indeed multi-perspectival view of lived religion in late antique southern Gaul. I shall consider two case studies: the first looks at rituals attached to the nativity of John the Baptist, which took place at harvest time; the second looks at the range of technologies associated with protection against a major scourge of the harvest, hail.

Lived Religion in the Calendar: The Feast of John the Baptist

Here I shall explore the festival of John the Baptist as an example of the enduring power of the seasons, the calendar and the agricultural cycle in the structuring of life, religion and culture. I shall demonstrate how the sources dealing with this festival reveal how individuals and communities could blend and interpret different aspects of ritual practice as part of their ‘lived religion’. Finally, I shall examine how the response of clerical figures to this blending and interpretation was just as varied as the local practices to which they reacted.

Let’s begin once more with Caesarius, who in the midst of a sermon on tithes (to which we shall return) switches to exhort his congregation to celebrate the upcoming nativity of John the Baptist ‘with upright conscience’. He has a stark warning to give:

While he goes on to object, in familiar fashion, to the singing of impure songs at the associated celebrations, the prohibition against ritual bathing shows that here we have a festival that is highly distinctive. This feature also plunges us (as it were) into the specific rural landscape in which Caesarius’ congregation lived. Marshes are a notable feature of the landscape of the Camargue, while ponds (étangs) dot the Berre region; the Rhône and its tributaries are also geographically notable featuresFootnote ¹¹ (see Map 2). What were these people actually doing? According to Caesarius, this was remnant of ‘pagan’ practice. William Klingshirn suggests a much more nuanced interpretation in which the local Christians have actually adapted a traditional bathing activity:

I shall use this as a starting point for the analysis of what follows: here we have a very neat example of ‘lived religion’.

But first we need to step back and take a more detailed look at the festival and our evidence. The festival in question is in fact one of two feasts celebrating John the Baptist, both in the summer: the saint’s nativity was celebrated on 24 June, while his martyrdom was remembered on 29 August. It was always the former festival that constituted the main focus for celebration. The question immediately arises: why was it the saint’s nativity, rather than his martyrdom as usual, that was commemorated? The answer lies in the date, 24 June, one of notable calendrical and seasonal significance: it falls in midsummer, close to the summer solstice, but also half a year from the nativity of Christ, a symmetry played upon across various Christian texts, as we shall see. The popularity of this festival in late antique and early medieval Provence is widely attested. Clerical discourse concentrates both on practices distinctive to this specific festival and those we have already identified as common to clerical critiques of popular culture in general. In my discussion I shall discuss texts from late antique North Africa in addition to those from Provence, not only because of notable crossovers in practices but also because of substantial textual connections in terms of transmission and manuscript tradition.

Caesarius’ three sermons on the feast of John the Baptist contain, as is typical, substantial amounts of material from other sermon collections, including both ‘Eusebius Gallicanus’ and a collection from North Africa.Footnote ¹³ Sermo 33 is the only of these which deals with the celebrations, and while a large part of the text derives from a sermon in the North African collection, the section dealing with the rituals themselves appears to be distinctively Caesarian.Footnote ¹⁴ The earlier North African sermons that discuss the feast include several by Augustine, one by Pseudo-Fulgentius and two further, anonymous, texts which most likely also hail from North Africa.Footnote ¹⁵ I shall also consider some later material, with appropriate caution. Celebrations of the feast of John the Baptist are castigated in the eighth-century sermon embedded in the Vita Eligii;Footnote ¹⁶ some intriguing behaviour is also attacked by Atto of Vercelli, in tenth-century Piedmont;Footnote ¹⁷ finally, the Legenda Aurea draws on some rather ingenious scholastic discussion of the celebrations.Footnote ¹⁸ From the later middle ages through to at least the late nineteenth century there are discussions and records of festivities related to the feast of the Baptist in Provence but also elsewhere in western Europe.Footnote ¹⁹

As we shall see in the next chapter (dealing with the Kalends of January), the religious meaning and significance of the calendar was a subject of great importance and controversy in late antiquity. The date of the nativity of John the Baptist was undoubtedly the reason for the festival’s importance. While preachers would often belittle the significance of the secular calendar, calendrical thinking was nonetheless of considerable significance to the church, which placed great importance on what we might see as the cosmic significance of the Christian calendar. Indeed, Augustine actually discusses the festivities of John the Baptist in a Christmas sermon. First, he delivers an advance warning to his congregation, admonishing them not to misbehave on the Kalends of January, and in so doing makes a fascinating digression in order to recount what he sees as a cautionary tale regarding the summer festival.

He begins: ‘On the birthday of John the Baptist six months ago (for the two birthdays of the herald and of the Judge are six months apart).’Footnote ²⁰ As the ‘forerunner’, John the Baptist was born half a year before Christ in what was clearly seen as a very fitting symmetry. Caesarius’ Sermo 216 likewise plays on the calendrical significance of the two births and their relation to the solstice: ‘In order that man might be humbled, John was born on the same day that the days begin to grow shorter; in order that God might be exalted, Christ was born on that day when the days begin to grow longer.’Footnote ²¹ The same sermon tells us that John was sent ahead ‘like a lamp’,Footnote ²² a simile which is prominent in the North African texts, as we shall see.

Our clerical texts, therefore, certainly play on the calendrical and celestial significance of the date of the festival. What do we know about non-Christian commemorations and interpretations of 24 June that might also have had resonance for the congregation? According to the traditional Roman religious calendar, 24 June was the festival of Fors Fortuna, the celebration of which in the city of Rome involved boat trips on the Tiber. Columella associates the day with market gardeners taking their produce to market. What else? Scullard drily comments: ‘The day of the festival happened to be Midsummer’s Day, the summer solstice, but attempts to find a connection in the ritual are not convincing.’Footnote ²³ In any case, there is no sign at all of any cult of Fortuna in either Gaul or North Africa in late antiquity. Of more interest is a connection with Ceres, at least in North Africa, as we shall see. The Codex Calendar of 354, which for 24 June lists both Fors Fortuna and the Solstice, depicts a naked male figure carrying a torch, while the accompanying texts refers to the ripe corn as ‘heads of Ceres’.Footnote ²⁴ The mythographer Fulgentius makes an unambiguous connection between the story of Ceres and Prosperina and a ‘day of torches’ which we know from our North African homiletic sources to have been celebrated on 24 June.Footnote ²⁵ Four of these sermons make reference to a lampadarum dies involving a procession with torches.Footnote ²⁶ A mosaic calendar from Thysdrus (El Djem in Tunisia), meanwhile, appears to depict a pavilion selling items which might well be torches to customers (Figure 5.1).Footnote ²⁷ Augustine’s account intriguingly suggests an urban rather than a rural event: ‘Yesterday evening, the whole city was set ablaze by stinking flames; the air was covered in smoke.’Footnote ²⁸

Figure 5.1 Depiction of June on the mosaic calendar from El Djem, now at the Musée archéologique de Sousse.

Photograph: Alamy.

Augustine further specifies that the torches were carried by pueri: he says sternly that their elders should have forbidden this.Footnote ²⁹ Put together, this evidence suggests a lively urban ritual with a key role for young men, a feature familiar from many instances of expressions of popular culture across other periods. We have nothing comparable from Provence, however.

So what can we deduce about who was participating in the bathing rituals in Provence? In his attack on the practice in Sermo 33 Caesarius explicitly presents this activity as something carried out by others: ‘I beseech [deprecor] and adjure [adiuro] you … to admonish your neighbours, your household, and all who are related to you, and to reprove them severely out of zeal for God [omnes vicinos vestros, omnes familias, et cunctos ad vos pertinentes].’Footnote ³⁰ That is, the audience he is addressing are not presented as night-swimmers themselves. Rather, we see Caesarius speaking to a congregation made up of domini and asking them to discipline their tenants and dependants. We might wonder: would the supposedly respectable landowners of late antique Provence have felt comfortable stripping off their outer garments to bathe in the ponds and waterways together with their social inferiors? Or was this a practice they were in fact happy to leave to others? On the other hand, we could also suspect that Caesarius is in fact seeking to denigrate a more widely held practice by ascribing to it lower-class associations, as he does elsewhere. Of course, we cannot be sure.

The date of 24 June fell during harvest time in late antique Provence, as in North Africa.Footnote ³¹ Caesarius’ Sermo 33 begins with an allusion to this crucial time: ‘the days are nearly here in which we should gather the harvest’.Footnote ³² The first part of the sermon is in fact not to do with the nativity of John the Baptist at all but is rather on the subject of tithing. Caesarius is generally understood to have played a key role both in elaborating the theology and developing the systematization of tithing. He does indeed exhort tithing across no fewer than twelve of his sermons.Footnote ³³ Even if part of the tithing discussion in Serm. 33 is ‘borrowed’ from an earlier sermon,Footnote ³⁴ it certainly fits a broader enthusiasm for the tithe held by Caesarius, which would later extend across Merovingian Gaul. The pro-tithing message is hammered home, with typical vigour: that all earthly fruits belong to God, and any failure to return the full, required, one-tenth is ungrateful and sinful in the extreme.Footnote ³⁵ The sermon alludes to poor harvests due to drought or the effect of frost or hail on the grape vintage, and suggests that such poor harvests constitute a just punishment for a refusal to tithe.Footnote ³⁶ We can therefore see the festival as fully embedded in the context of a crucial period in the agricultural calendar but also in terms of potential tensions around extractions, to which we shall return later in this chapter.

Caesarius’ sermons do not mention celebrations with torches, unlike the North African material. According to Brent Shaw: ‘[w]e know that the Day of the Torches was the most important social ritual that marked the time of the harvest, not only in Africa but in the later empire at large’.Footnote ³⁷ However, secure evidence for these practices outside North Africa is in fact lacking – despite the suggestive appearance of the torch in the entry for June in the Calendar of 354, as we saw. Customs to do with fire did eventually accrue in Provence, as well as elsewhere in rural France and western Europe, traceable from the later middle ages, but, as ever, we need to avoid assuming continuity when there is such a notable gap in the evidence.Footnote ³⁸

Indeed, Jules Breton’s 1875 painting of a Saint-Jean feu de joie, as depicted on the cover of the book, depicts a moonlit bonfire celebration.Footnote ³⁹ In late antiquity the festivities associated with the festival of St John began, as usual for a saint’s feast, the night before the anniversary itself, with the ‘vigil’. These night-time festivities were viewed with consistent suspicion by the church, as we have already seen. These celebrations were likely to include alcohol, and thus rowdy and indeed libidinous activity, hence the long tradition of clerical complaints about behaviour at martyrs’ vigils.Footnote ⁴⁰ Inappropriate night-time gatherings have certain clichéd components, as we saw in the previous chapter. The singing of bawdy songs is one of these and, sure enough, we learn that the feast provides opportunities for cantica turpiosa vel luxuriosa.Footnote ⁴¹ With singing comes dancing, again both a prominent feature of popular culture celebrations and a favourite target for attacks on this popular culture. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that dancing appears as a feature of the festivities in several of our accounts, beginning with that of Augustine.Footnote ⁴² The dancing round the bonfire in Breton’s painting finds correspondence in folkloric discussions: circular dances, especially around fires, have been seen as attempts to imitate the shape of the sun, as ‘magical’ circumambulatory rites.Footnote ⁴³ Night-time was indeed traditionally associated with illicit religious activity of various types.Footnote ⁴⁴ Nefarious nocturnal activities were often associated specifically with women. Atto of Vercelli attacked meretriculae (strikingly translated by Filotas as ‘little trollops’!), who were accused of abandoning the offices of the church and instead are depicted as hanging around ‘in the streets and crossroads, by springs and in the countryside; they form round dances, compose songs, draw lots, and pretend that people’s prospects are to be predicted from things of this sort’.Footnote ⁴⁵ This passage indeed shows the long life of a number of gendered associations: associating women with popular culture and thereby with the streets, and in particular street corners (compita),Footnote ⁴⁶ as well as associating them with dubious non-religious ‘superstitious’ activities, in this case with practices of divination. The other type of site that these women are supposed to be frequenting is springs (fontes), which takes us to another crucial aspect of the St John rituals.

The presence of a bathing ritual as a part of the festival is found in both North Africa and Provence. We have already seen Caesarius’ prohibition: ‘Let no one on the feast of St John dare to bathe in springs or marshes or rivers either at night or early in the morning; that unhappy custom is a relic of pagan observances.’Footnote ⁴⁷ In Hippo, as we saw, Augustine recalls the occurrence of a bathing ritual a full six months after it happened: ‘On the birthday of John the Baptist six months ago … in celebration of a pagan superstition [de solemnitate superstitiosa pagana], Christians came to the sea and there they baptized themselves [Christiani ad mare veniebant et ibi se baptizabant].’Footnote ⁴⁸ Augustine and Caesarius seem to be talking about actual bathing, involving immersion: Caesarius, as we have already seen, claimed that this was a highly dangerous practice resulting in ‘very frequent’ deaths.Footnote ⁴⁹ A connection to baptism is made explicit by Augustine, who claims that people had baptized themselves in the sea – a particularly charged claim in the context of the bitter debates over re-baptism in the Donatist controversy. Caesarius, meanwhile, calls the bathing a sacrilega lavatio:Footnote ⁵⁰ his choice of the term lavatio helps him denigrate the practice by suggesting pagan connotations.Footnote ⁵¹ Augustine does not tell us what time of day the bathing took place but Caesarius is explicit that the activity occurred early in the morning or late at night. The former seems to be traditional but the latter suggestion, as we have seen, lends an especially ‘magical’, and indeed illicit, cast to the activity. A further range of washing practices are known from later folklore, in association with St John’s Day. These range from full immersion to the washing of hands and faces in open water sources, as well as rolling in the dew (hence the association with early morning). Testimonies come from the middle ages through to much more recent times, and not just in Mediterranean areas but even as far north as Cologne, as observed by Petrarch.Footnote ⁵²

The bathing aspect of the ritual has a number of resonances beyond evoking the natural landscape of the territorium of Arles. Caesarius claims that his flock were bathing aut in fontibus aut in paludibus aut in fluminibus (either in springs, or in marshes, or in rivers). The first of these, fontes, springs, are regularly attested as a locale for religious practice – religious practice that was deeply suspect in the eyes of the church. Complaints about spring worship are a standard topos, appearing in the writings of Caesarius and in those of his later excerptors and plagiarizers.Footnote ⁵³ How seriously should we take these allegations? Coin deposit at springs is the most obvious archaeologically attested form of religious ritual associated with springs, even though the evidence of these deposits shows a sharp decline at the turn of the fourth to fifth centuries.Footnote ⁵⁴ However, most of the practices attacked in late antique and early medieval sources, even assuming we accept their historicity, would be impossible to trace archaeologically: for instance, the lighting of candles and the offering of bread, as attacked by Martin of Braga.Footnote ⁵⁵ Springs were of course not the only water source with religious associations: we have already come across Gregory of Tours’ anecdote about the sacred swamp in the Auvergne.

A range of participant motivations are reported by both observers and critics of these bathing practices.Footnote ⁵⁶ Augustine explicitly links the sea-bathing at Hippo with baptism, as we have seen: although he does not say that this is how the participants themselves described the activity, it seems the most likely interpretation. Augustine himself was certainly not minded to accept such behaviour as within the bounds of acceptable religiosity (and here Caesarius, as so often, followed his lead). Looking back on the ‘incident’ from the distance of six months, Augustine recalls that the participants at Hippo had undergone ‘ecclesiastical discipline’ for their watery exploits, in response to which they had ‘murmured’ and objected: ‘How great was it that it should be reported of us [Quantum erat ut indicaretur nobis]? If the priests had warned us, we would not have done it.’Footnote ⁵⁷ Augustine, who been absent from Hippo at the time, declares that he is now giving just such a warning; that is, for next time. What precisely the ecclesiastica disciplina the guilty parties had been subjected to is unclear. However, what we can see here is a familiar pattern in relations between the bishop of Hippo and his congregations whereby he chastises them, labels their long-held practices as ‘pagan’ and forbids them. For us as scholars, however (and presumably also for the members of the congregations), it is evident that long-held rituals practised by Christian communities should not really be labelled ‘pagan’.Footnote ⁵⁸ The Christians at Hippo thought what they were doing on 24 June was perfectly legitimate – just as, in a famous case, Augustine’s own mother Monica was participating in a long-established Christian tradition when she took cakes and wine to church at Milan.Footnote ⁵⁹

We can clearly see the propensity of Christians, in various locations and periods, to interpret the feast of John the Baptist, and the theme of baptism, in their own distinctive ways. In the tenth century the bishop of Vercelli in Piedmont, Atto, was enraged that his congregation were embracing the baptismal theme in directions of which he most definitely did not approve: he claims that they baptized grass and branches.Footnote ⁶⁰ Back in sixth-century Arles, meanwhile, Caesarius unfortunately, but entirely typically, fails to give his congregation’s side of the story when it came to their nocturnal bathing. I have already suggested that William Klingshirn’s interpretation, which views the participants as active agents constructing their own form of communal, local religion, purposively, in their adaptation of a traditional bathing activity, in a new blending of the church and agricultural calendars, is the right one.Footnote ⁶¹ This makes for a very nice case study for thinking about popular culture as ‘lived religion’. We might return again to Meredith B. McGuire, in her monograph Lived Religion: Faith and Practice in Everyday Life, who writes: ‘The diffuseness of the sacred and its interpenetration with the profane in people’s everyday lives were … due, in large part, to how thoroughly a complex series of calendrical rituals structured those lives.’Footnote ⁶² An expansive definition of ‘ritual’ is most useful here: broadly speaking, rituals allow for the intersection of the sacred and the profane through practice. Rituals did not just reflect the diverse and changing religious landscape but also contributed to its ongoing transformation. The blending activity involved in the celebration of the festival of the nativity of John the Baptist is familiar,Footnote ⁶³ and concepts such as ‘creolization’ (an important theme in post-colonial scholarship’) and ‘bricolage’ (an influential term in post-structural scholarship and cultural studies, including, of course, the analysis of popular culture) are also appropriate here.Footnote ⁶⁴ Ultimately rituals enable groups and individuals alike to both express and negotiate – and sometimes contest – important elements of their social relations and their views of what we could call the ‘cosmic order’.Footnote ⁶⁵ In late antiquity both the performance and meanings of ritual were frequently both challenged and reshaped, as we see in several examples across this book.

Bishops and other ecclesiasts responded to the religious adaptations and behaviours of their congregations with what we might see as a sliding scale of permissiveness. Augustine and Caesarius certainly both stood at the stricter end of the scale. Ecclesiastical responses to the lampadarium dies undoubtedly varied.Footnote ⁶⁶ Augustine strongly railed against the torchlit procession in Carthage, as we saw, while ‘Pseudo-Fulgentius’ lamented the very existence of the lampadarium dies, proclaiming that those who named it thus themselves remained in the midst of darkness.Footnote ⁶⁷ However, the author of the anonymous sermon edited by Dolbeau and Étaix is willing to make a much more positive use of the metaphor. This preacher gives what the editors call a ‘spiritualised reading’ of the celebrations: he seemingly accepts the ritual without reserve, happily making the link to John the Baptist explicit.Footnote ⁶⁸ In this instance we can see a collaborative process of religious adaptation and construction in progress, across both laity and clergy. This was the kind of process that Caesarius continually rejected but that would ultimately account for the success and persistence of the John the Baptist rituals in Provence and elsewhere.Footnote ⁶⁹

The festival of the nativity of John the Baptist clearly worked on various levels, and surely herein lay the reason for its success and longevity. Its connection with calendrical and seasonal rhythms, particularly its association with the agricultural year, was obviously crucial. As we have seen, metaphor can be very powerful. The image of John the Baptist as a torch, lighting the way for Christ and the harvest alike, persisted in clerical discourse – which we should probably understand as a way of sanctioning local practices through association with the cult of the saints. The image of the blade cutting the ear of corn, just as it cut off the head of the saint, was also resonant. Brent Shaw’s in-depth study of the metaphor of reaping in the ancient world is suggestive here. Shaw comments: ‘A strong connection was being struck between a text that reflected the tropes of everyday life and which connected the preacher’s words with the daily experiences of the person hearing them.’Footnote ⁷⁰ Shaw cites the work of Pierre Bourdieu, specifically his fieldwork in late North Africa, which formed the basis for his important book The Logic of Practice. Bourdieu observed the habitus through the seasons and the agricultural work cycle, and saw that this, in Shaw’s words, ‘formed a work-thought world in which people live’ and ‘a pattern of experiential knowledge that was represented to the villagers themselves as an annual cycle’.Footnote ⁷¹ For a religious system and its component rituals to be successful, it needed to be embedded in this thought-world and in this cycle.Footnote ⁷²

To counter-pose this, I want briefly to consider a case that shows the difficulty that rituals that were imposed top-down could face in acceptance. The ritual that later became widely known as ‘the rogations’ was based on an ecclesiastical ritual of purification and atonement involving a full three days of fasting, sermons and processions, performed not just by the clergy but by the entire Christian community.Footnote ⁷³ As has often been discussed, one version of the ritual first gained traction during a period of political and military upheaval in Gaul, in the last quarter of the fifth century. Sidonius Apollinaris wrote to his friend Mamertus, bishop of Vienne, in 473, a time of crisis when the Gothic armies were once again close at hand. Sidonius wrote that he had followed Mamertus’ practices and imported the new ritual of the rogations himself: ‘Our only present help we find in those rogations which you introduced and this is the reason why the people of Clermont refuse to recede, though terrors surge about them on every side.’Footnote ⁷⁴ According to Sidonius, the rituals in Vienne had successfully stopped disasters, ranging from earthquakes to packs of wild animals. Sidonius was hoping that these propitiatory rites would preserve his own congregation from the depredations of the Gothic armies. We can see further that Sidonius was not the only bishop to find the rituals effective: rogations were sanctioned for the whole of Gaul at the Council of Orléans in 511.Footnote ⁷⁵

Scholars have tried to find deeper roots for the various rogation rituals of late antiquity and the middle ages, for instance attempting to link them with the rural Italian festival of Robigalia, which fits the dates, taking place on 24 April. The Robigalia sought to protect the crops from the dangerous numen Robigus; however, there is no sign that this festival ever made it to Gaul.Footnote ⁷⁶ An alternative connection has been made with the lustration rite of Ambarvalia, which involved purifications and processions in both the city and the countryside, but again proof is lacking – especially for Gaul.Footnote ⁷⁷ Nonetheless, it is very unlikely that the clergy invented the ceremonials entirely ex nihilo rather than building on, indeed appropriating, existing rituals of procession and circumambulation, some of which were examined earlier.Footnote ⁷⁸ Appropriation worked in both directions.

Nonetheless, the evidence from our period suggests that bishops had some difficulty bedding in their newly constructed ritual, despite its appropriated elements. Our ecclesiastical sources demonstrate a strong conviction that everyone needed to participate in order for the ritual to be effective. The canon from Orléans specifically requires the participation of the entire community, including slaves, while other sources stress the participation of both the aristocracy and even royalty.Footnote ⁷⁹ Caesarius goes so far as to claim that leaving church during rogation ceremonies would be akin to deserting an army in the midst of battle: this suggests both how seriously he took the notion of total participation and the difficulty he had in getting his congregation to participate as required.Footnote ⁸⁰ One of the Eusebius Gallicanus preachers states outright that not everyone in the congregation is participating properly: some are abstaining, some are even expressing scepticism.Footnote ⁸¹ Gregory of Tours for his part includes several accounts of processions that did not go smoothly.Footnote ⁸² Rogation rituals required the entire Christian community to act as one, under the leadership of their bishop, to atone together for communal transgressions, but it is not difficult to see that the process was not always smooth or successful. As Lisa Bailey comments on these cases: ‘[l]ay people did not always concur with clerical perspectives and a multiplicity of interpretations and responses were possible even within a pious Christian framework’.Footnote ⁸³ Even more pointedly, we could suggest that members of congregations were showing their resistance to participating in these clearly lengthy and somewhat wearing rituals that had been imposed on them. However, we can scarcely see the rogations as a case of ‘ritual failure’ in the longer term: the ritual would ultimately become a long-standing feature of the liturgical year with a smoothed-out linear account in ecclesiastical and liturgical history.

As we have already seen, the rituals of the nativity of St John the Baptist would also have a long history, with the accumulation of new aspects and interpretations. But for now we shall turn to my second case study, in which we can again see lived religion in operation in the late antique countryside, this time looking at the role of materiality, as well as ritual practices.

Appropriating Objects: Dealing with Hail

This time I shall begin with an account, this time from the Vita of Caesarius, of the following ‘very famous’ miracle, which occurred on an estate in the hill range of the Alpilles:

This is one of a number of instances in the second part of the Vita that deal with miracles effected by Caesarius, whether alive or dead, particularly through the medium of his possessions;Footnote ⁸⁵ it is moreover the second miracle effected by his left-behind staff.Footnote ⁸⁶ What is especially interesting about this specific miracle is the way in which it can be paralleled with other practices and indeed objects.

Hail was a feared phenomenon in the pre-modern world.Footnote ⁸⁷ Although only one of a range of persistent but potentially devastating environmental perils that threatened agriculture and viticulture, we can see how remedies targeted hail above all. Moreover, our evidence suggests it was the most dangerous phenomenon in our own region. As a significant sub-category of protective measures taken in a broadly agricultural context, a whole range of remedies against hail were used in the ancient Mediterranean, some of which, as detailed by the classical agronomists, are rather hair-raising (one practice mentioned by the late antique agronomist Palladius involved crucifying an owl).Footnote ⁸⁸ As well as the performance of rituals, and the recitation of spells, more permanent solutions included the use of inscribed objects (charms, talismans, amulets, phylacteries – various terms are possible) in situ. These inscribed objects sought to banish the demonic force/s seen as responsible for hail. A number of these devices have been found, hailing from different areas of the Mediterranean, made variously from metal, lead and clay.Footnote ⁸⁹ Some appear to have been buried for the purpose of efficacy, often on the boundaries of fields/vineyards, although others have holes, allowing them to be hung up, like Caesarius’ staff.Footnote ⁹⁰

We have two surviving examples of inscribed hail charms from southern France, albeit dating from an earlier period; that is, from the second century ce. These tablets are made of bronze and are small in size (8 × 13.4 cm and 5 × 6.4 cm, respectively); one of them seems to have been affixed to something, judging by the hole in its centre.Footnote ⁹¹ They are inscribed not in Latin but in Greek, and seek to claim the assistance of the otherwise unknown power Oamoutha, together with the more familiar demon Abraxas. Roy Kotansky suggests that the tablets were made in the same workshop; one of them is personalized with a name, which we can assume to be the name of the vineyard owner, one Julius Pervincus. Late antique examples which are more directly comparable with the staff-charm have been found in other areas of the Mediterranean, including North Africa, Spain and Sicily. What we have here then are late antique adaptations of a widespread ancient practice.Footnote ⁹²

A late antique lead cross from ancient Furnos Maius in Tunisia, considerably larger than the tablets just discussed (it measures 34 cm in height, 35 cm across the arms), was clearly designed to be hung up, as indicated by piercings made at the top and bottom.Footnote ⁹³ A significant part of the power of the charm was derived from its cross shape. In the case of Caesarius’ staff-charm, its particular materiality, as a cross made from an episcopal staff, was doubly powerful. The staff (baculus) itself was a well-known symbol or indeed attribute of divine power: two of the inscribed hail charms analysed by Francisco Javier Fernández Nieto refer to staffs in this way.Footnote ⁹⁴ The text from the Vita does not mention any text having been inscribed on the Alpilles staff-charm. Caesarius himself, of course, would clearly have strongly disapproved of the texts inscribed on these objects due to their entirely typical blend of invocations of a combination of angelic, demonic and other powers.Footnote ⁹⁵

Individuals and communities did their best to protect themselves against natural hazards, using a variety of available means. A range of literary evidence testifies to the role of clerics – and indeed saints – in the battle against hail. Gallic hagiographical texts include a number of stories in this vein, whereby saints prevented dramatic storms of various kinds, thus demonstrating their powers as thaumaturges.Footnote ⁹⁶ Gregory of Tours tells how he himself was able to stop a dramatic storm with the aid of a gold medallion that contained saints’ ashes, an object which had belonged to his father.Footnote ⁹⁷ Again we see how objects seem to be especially effective in transmitting divine power. In the eastern Mediterranean, Theodore of Sykeon erected crosses to prevent hail on several occasions, his hagiographer giving a helpfully full account. We are told how the saint prevented hail from attacking vineyards in the village of Reake with a ritual that included a procession of supplication and a circumambulation – a common element in anti-hail rituals – of the relevant areasFootnote ⁹⁸ and also involved placing a wooden cross at each of the four angles of the boundary line, the standard location for such charms.Footnote ⁹⁹ Holy men did not necessarily need to use objects in order to stop hail – and in most cases we simply do not know what they used – but for other members of the community, generally less gifted with supernatural and charismatic powers, material charms were clearly highly valued.

The cross was a highly powerful symbol to be used against such a feared element as hail, but often those making or commissioning protective objects would choose to maximize the protective power available by adding other special symbols. The cross from Furnos Maius was inscribed with a large quantity of ‘text’, covering most of its surfaces, and including powerful symbols at certain emphatic points, notably at the extremities. The pentagram symbol is repeated no fewer than nine times on the object: whether these iterations signify some specific ritual act in relation to the text (i.e. was the object’s ‘user’ meant to cross his or herself, while reciting the text?) we cannot know, but they are certainly very prominent visually. On one of the sides of this double-sided object the inscription begins with a pentagram, and then a cross (a so-called Greek cross). Indeed, pentagrams appear on a number of objects of this kind.Footnote ¹⁰⁰

The rituals for dealing with hail also involved a number of performative elements alongside the use of inscribed objects: speech acts in the forms of prayers/incantationsFootnote ¹⁰¹ and ritual movements and or/gestures. The text inscribed on the lead cross from Tunisia tells us that its owner (presumably) was required to stand on the spot and turn a full circle before repeating the exorcism formula three times.Footnote ¹⁰² In the case of Theodore of Sykeon, bodily movement and material object worked together to encircle and define the protected area.Footnote ¹⁰³ In the Vita of St Columba the saint used human markers in the form of four ‘devout individuals’ to mark out the area: Ille quattuor plenos religione viros per quattuor angulos messis praeponit.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Here we see just a few iterations of local lived religion: the construction of ritual practices combining adaptation, appropriation and improvisation.

A whole range of ritual practices, blending diverse elements, were widely accepted as legitimate protection against hail in late antiquity. A law of Constantine’s against magia (which we should probably translate in this context as ‘sorcery’) explicitly excluded ‘innocent’ remedies against hailstorms – which, the law states, sought to protect divine gifts and human labour alike – from punishment.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ This law was then re-issued in the Codex Justinianus, somewhat strikingly given its generally harsher legal response to magic.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ However, the fate of this law was distinctively different in Alaric’s Breviarium of 506, a document hailing (as it were) from southern Gaul.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Although the law itself was repeated verbatim, an interpretatio that was added refers specifically to a different sort of hail magic, not this time a technique that sought to avert to prevent storms but rather one that sought to conjure them. Rather than making an exception, this text tends in quite the opposite direction: ‘Magicians, enchanters or conjurors of storms, or those who through the invocation of demons disturb the minds of men, shall be punished with every kind of punishment.’Footnote ¹⁰⁸ That is, storm conjurors (immissores tempestatum) are specifically singled out for punishment.

All of these instances remind us of the huge importance of the weather to an agrarian society and the strong imperative to protect the harvest by any means necessary. How then might we understand the distinctive injunction of the Breviarium? We might (as others have done) see the lawmakers of the Visigothic kingdom as reflecting a particular interest in religious orthodoxy and a specific concern around witchcraft.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ In fact, the stipulation of the Breviarum takes us back to the concerns of the earliest sources for Roman law: the Twelve Tables specified the highest penalty for those who used spells or incantations to attack or steal the harvest of a neighbour.Footnote ¹¹⁰ The passage from the Breviarum reminds us that there were two sides to being a ‘cloud driver’ or tempestarius: the ability to ‘conjure’ storms was just as sought after as the power to stop them, although evidently much more controversial.Footnote ¹¹¹ We can also see a range of interpretations in late antiquity as to who exactly was to blame for hailstorms: whether sorcerers, demons or the Devil himself – or indeed a vengeful holy man. Gregory of Tours’ ability to make the clouds miraculously part with his charm showed him to be ‘a tempestarius par excellence’, as Yitzak Hen comments;Footnote ¹¹² even more worthy of the title was the eastern holy man Theodore of Sykeon, who conjured, as well as prevented, storms. On an occasion (notably not included in the English translation of his Life!) Theodore summoned hail to fall on the crops of the residents of the village of Halios because they had failed to follow his injunctions regarding a local dispute he had been called upon to adjudicate.Footnote ¹¹³

As we are thinking about lived religion as a form of popular culture, it is time to probe more deeply into the various social and economic issues and tensions at stake in both hail rituals and their prohibition. Acceptance of the efficacy of objects and rituals to protect the land from hail was clearly shared widely across society throughout antiquity and late antiquity, as we have seen. Even wealthy and high-status individuals had an interest in procuring protection of their crops from hail. Sulpicius Severus claimed that a landowner of ‘praefectorial status’ sent an embassy to Martin of Tours when hail storms affected his fields particularly badly.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Caesarius’ hagiographers stress that the baculus-cross was set up against the hail by a nobilissimus landowner.Footnote ¹¹⁵ (Although we might suspect that they are keen to emphasize this in order to stress the respectability of the incident.) The bronze tablets and the late antique crosses that we looked at earlier clearly required financial resources and access to ritual expertise alike.Footnote ¹¹⁶ However, the danger posed by hail to income was of course proportionally much greater for tenants or for small landowners, of whom there were many. With reference to the case of the grape harvest, for instance, in Chapter 3 we looked at the evidence for ownership and stewardship of small parcels of vineyard, often known as vineolae, by the non-elite, including former slaves.Footnote ¹¹⁷ If we move forward in time, into the Carolingian period, we can get a fascinating and suggestive insight into how different social and economic interests might have intersected around hail rituals.

Around the years 815–17 the reformist Carolingian cleric Agobard of Lyon wrote a treatise specifically to counter belief in the power of tempestarii to cause storms.Footnote ¹¹⁸ According to Agobard, it was widely believed that the tempestarii could both prevent and provoke storms by means of incantations, and were paid (off) with a part of the produce, a payment known as the canonicum. Paul Edward Dutton has made the fascinating suggestion that here we glimpse early medieval peasants acting strategically in their own financial interest. Agobard complains that people were willing to pay the canonicum but were far less willing to pay their tithes or alms. Dutton suggests that peasants might have made accusations of hail-conjuring as a pretext for avoiding unwelcome exactions: ‘one has to wonder, in view of the popular resentment of and occasional resistance to taxation, if the tribute paid to the weather-makers was not effectively an anti-tithe, the means precisely for peasants to avoid paying tithes’.Footnote ¹¹⁹

At this point we can recall the passage in Caesarius’ Sermo 33 on tithing, where the preacher suggests to an imagined reluctant tithe-giver that if his harvest failed due to a lack of rain, or an excess of hail or frost, this would be because of his refusal to pay tithes, exacted by God himself.Footnote ¹²⁰ According to the sermon, this exacting is a ‘most just custom’ – but it would not necessarily have seemed that way to his congregation. While Caesarius’ congregation could probably in fact have avoided the church tithe without too much difficulty or risk (despite such threats of heavenly retribution), what about the more demanding exactions of landlords? Agobard’s text involves a much-discussed fantastical and ultimately rather shaggy dog tale about an attempted assault on four outsiders who were supposed to be ‘aerial sailors’, in league with the tempestarii. Dutton suggests that the villagers had in fact secreted a large portion of wheat away from the eyes of the lord and the church and were using this story to avoid exaction of the harvest.Footnote ¹²¹ This can only be speculation but offers an intriguing instance to help us think about ways in which peasants could use ‘lived religion’ to their own advantage, a theme to which we will return.

We have seen that a wide cross-section of rural society was involved with beliefs and rituals as regards weather rituals. What can we say about the tempestarii themselves, and others like them? While some have seen them as independent operators, acting as rivals to the church, Rob Meens suggested the Carolingian tempestarii were themselves priests.Footnote ¹²² This seems quite probable given the persistent association of clerics with divination and amulet production as seemingly profitable side-lines.Footnote ¹²³ However, our sources also suggest that many ritual practitioners were of sub-elite or non-elite status: it was as such that they could be so easily disparaged by our literary texts and so summarily dealt with by the legal authorities.Footnote ¹²⁴ Certainly, legal and ecclesiastical strictures focused most of their ire, and their punishments, on those of lesser status. Caesarius ordered the beating of those consulting ‘sorcerers, diviners or enchanters’ (caraios … et divinos vel praecantatores inquirere), as well as those using various types of amulets: ‘devilish phylacteries, magical signs, herbs or amber’ (fylacteria etiam diabolica, characteres aut herbas vel sucinos).Footnote ¹²⁵ The Council of Narbonne in 589 dealt with the misdeeds of ‘diviners’: it prescribed excommunication and a large fine of six gold solidi but also specified severe punishments for specifically low-status practitioners: ‘Whether freed people or slaves or maid-servants [liberi … servi … ancille], let them be publicly and severely beaten and sold, and let the money be distributed to the poor.’Footnote ¹²⁶

As we found in Chapter 4, if we attempt to map individual religious or indeed social practices onto social status, it generally becomes clear that discursive distinctions are based not on practice as such but rather on relative authority, status and power. People of all classes used such remedies as they could against hail and other natural calamities. We began with Caesarius’ episcopal staff, left behind on a pastoral visit to the Alpilles, appropriated by the local landowner. This is in fact the second episode in the Vita in which the episcopal baculus was forgotten: it was forgotten earlier during a visit to a church property (agrum ecclesiae nostrae) at an otherwise unknown site called Succentriones.Footnote ¹²⁷ A seemingly abandoned bathhouse was haunted by a demon or demons inciting terror throughout the vicinity by throwing stones and calling out the names of passers-by. We are told that the inhabitants of the estate (incolae loci illius) – no other designation is given – were delighted to take possession of the episcopal staff, which they proceeded to hang from the wall of the bathhouse, from where it repelled the ‘devil’s snare’, just as it repelled hail in the Alpilles. It seems likely that these ‘inhabitants’ were low-status tenants or coloni, as they are given no high-status designation,Footnote ¹²⁸ and it is interesting to see how they were, even if by default, able to appropriate the very symbol of episcopal authority – and use it to construct their own local Christianity,Footnote ¹²⁹ very much on the model of ‘lived religion.’ In the previous chapter we viewed the people of the territorium of Arles through the prism of the ‘Caesarian’ corpus, which depicted an activist bishop on a mission to discipline the bodies and activities of the inhabitants. In this chapter, even through partial chinks, we can gain more of a sense of the ways in which these inhabitants themselves responded to and adapted for themselves the discourses and rituals offered by the bishop and his church. These responses were shaped by social and economic structures and the local environment alike.

What, then, does the response to hail tell us about lived religion and popular culture in late antique southern Gaul? Clearly, and indeed unsurprisingly, we find no segregated ‘popular’ religion. Instead, we see a range of actors, individuals and communities, using objects and rituals, appropriating and blending, taking elements from above and below, in order to construct their versions of ‘lived religion’. As we have seen, actors of different social status and indeed gender were often liable to have their activities represented in distinct ways – as variously authorized or de-authorized, accordingly. This is not to say that we need to assume that non-elites were always going to be the losers. Following the examples and suggestions in this chapter, we can posit agency in the cases of peasants using magical accusations to their own advantage (as with Agobard), or using the patronage of holy men as it suited with them (as with Theodore),Footnote ¹³⁰ or even appropriating the bishop’s very symbol of authority (as with Caesarius’ staff). On occasion, of course, these could be risky strategies for the relatively powerless. Nonetheless, with Cam Grey’s work on the strategies employed by non-elites in the late antique countryside in mind,Footnote ¹³¹ perhaps we need not always see peasants as entirely without resources, material and supernatural alike. What we can certainly see is that ‘lived religion’ constituted one of a number of strategies that could be employed as part of popular culture.

Conclusions

In this chapter I have considered a range of aspects of ‘lived religion’ as a deeply embedded aspect of (late antique) popular culture. I have shown how individuals and communities variously appropriated, created, adapted and even resisted aspects of religion as part of constructing their own forms, as well as through collaboration with others. I began with a famous passage from Gregory of Tours insisting that an episcopal designation of sacrality replaced existing practices embedded in the natural environment – but we saw that the picture was far more complex in practice. Next I explored the theme of adaptation and appropriation in accordance with the natural environment, turning to the field of ritual, by looking at the development of practices associated with the festival of John the Baptist in Provence and North Africa. By contrast, I considered briefly the case of an ecclesiastical ritual, the development of rogations, that seemed to have been less ripe for successful adaptation and more likely to receive lay resistance, albeit low-level. Finally, I took a story of how Caesarius’ staff was appropriated into a system of protection against a natural element, envisaged as a powerful and demonic enemy. We saw here how a deeply unequal rural society responded to the threat of crop destruction. Again we could see differing interests – of non-elites, secular and ecclesiastical elites – both converging and conflicting.

Throughout this chapter I have argued that we can use a model of lived religion that is both analogous to and part of popular culture. In order to bring out the more distinctively dialectical and oppositional aspects of popular culture, it is time to turn to a new case study. In Chapter 6, I shall build on the themes of this chapter and of Chapter 4 before it. I shall look at the Kalends of January as a focus for the church’s attempt to denigrate and shut down popular culture, but also as providing an opportunity both for its exercise and for the possibility of resistance.